Flying Dagger (1993)

Ah, yes. Chu Yen-Ping. If Wong Jing is the king of cinematic nonsense and crap in Hong Kong, Chu Yen-Ping is his second-in-command. Chu will forever be known by Hong Kong fans as "the father of Chinese Nazi movies" with Fantasy Mission Force, which strangely enough featured Jackie Chan in a supporting role. He proceeded to make two more movies with evil Chinese Nazis before continuing on to other films. He also was a pioneer in the "Kung Fu Kid" sub-genre, with series like Young Dragons: Kung Fu Kids and the Shaolin Popeye movies. I must note here that Shaolin Popeye 2: Messy Temple, has a scene where a 10-year old kung fu kid drinks milk from a Shaolin nun's breast and starts performing the drunken style(!).

This one of the movies he made during the Hong Kong "New Wave" of wire-fu films in the early 1990s. I thought this was going to be parody of the genre, although it's not quite that. I think The Eagle Shooting Heroes comes closer to a parody than this one. However, this one really isn't that bad; it's actually better than I was expecting.

The movie is about two groups of bounty hunters hunting a thief and his consort. The first group is Big Dagger (Tony Leung Ka-Fei) and Little Dagger (Jimmy Lin), the second group consists of Big Bewitchment (Cheung Man) and Little Bewitchment (Gloria Yip). They're rivals, but they secretly like each other. The thief they're after is Nine-Tailed Fox (Jackie Cheung) and his consort, played by Maggie Cheung. That's the general idea of the plot, although there are enough supporting characters, including rival bounty hunters and evil Ming officials, to keep things moving at a good clip.

This movie once was available at Blockbuster Video, strangely enough. The film's distributor also got copies of The Undaunted Wudang, Golden Dart Hero, and Slave of the Sword (a soft-core swordplay movie directed by Mr. Chu himself) into Blockbuster. Two obscure Mainland China martial arts films and two "different" entries in the New Wave subgenre, that's pretty impressive for Blockbuster. Too bad they started sucking after they switched over to DVD.

So the movie is pretty screwy. There's gay swordsman who sings in English (bear in mind this film takes place in the Ming Dynasty), a disembodied hand who's basically Thing from "The Addams Family" transplanted to ancient China, a villain named Die Quickly (who dies after one hit), a villain named Die Hard, another villain named Never Die, a poison that kills you unless you have sex, and a crazy lecherous eunuch. Oh, Nine-Tailed Fox likes to use his long tails in battle and his consort fights by flying through the air and shrieking like a cat.

All of this stuff might make this film a tough sell, but thankfully there's a crazy over-the-top wire-fu action set-piece every 10 minutes. The sword fights are choreographed by Ching Siu-Tung (Chinese Ghost Story, Hero), Ma Yuk-Sing (Ching's protégé), and Dion Lam (Spider-Man 2, The Storm Riders). If you've any of Ching's films from the 1990s, you'll know what to expect: qi attacks, lots of people flying on wires, fabrics being used as weapons, objects flying on wires, swords, spinning and twirling, and very little actual martial arts. I enjoyed the action sequences, although they don't quite match up with those that Ching did in Butterfly and Sword (which Chu Yen-Ping incidentally produced).

Yeah, if you can stomach the strange humor, this is a pretty entertaining little film. I enjoyed watching these popular actors overact and make fools of themselves while flying around on wires. It's great time for everyone!

So today we had a lengthy discussion about the military-industrial complex, how much countries spend in defense, how a substantial part of America's GDP comes from defense spending, that many American companies sell weapons to other countries, etc. So what was my contribution to the discussion, you ask?

"The worst part of it is, the M-16 is still inferior to the AK-47."

Apparently, this took everyone off guard and some of the students thought it was a laugh riot. Whatever.

...when the movie your psychology teacher shows you to teach you about Gestalt opens with "Golan-Globus" in the credits. If you weren't around in the 1980s, Golan and Globus were two Israeli producers who headed Cannon Films during that decade. They're responsible for the American Ninja films, most of Chuck Norris' filmography, two movies about the lambada, and lots of other important cultural films.

To my teacher's credit, the film was Powaqquatsi, which appeared to be some documentary with some incident about exploitation in Brazil as its opening scene.

I announced a few weeks back that I'd watch five more kung fu films (I've watched three so far) and than I'd take a break for a few months to investigate other genres and resolve other things. Well, much like Jet Li when he announced that he wouldn't make any more kung fu or wushu or whatever films, I should clarify my position. I'll stop seeking out "new" kung fu films after these next two. I'll probably watch films that I have in my collection and haven't seen for some time. I'll also occasionally revisit some of my favorite fight scenes. But I won't see kung fu films that I haven't ever seen until around October.